Adolf Eichmann Adolf Eichmann was a thin little man with
bow legs and a hook nose. In the civilian world he had been viewed as
of no account, a socially awkward loser with little to redeem himself. Having joined the Nazi party, however, his
unquestioning commitment to orders coupled with his need for ruthless efficiency allowed
him to carve out a career that see him go down as one of the greatest mass murderers
in all of human history. In this week’s Biographics, we trace the
life, crimes and death of Adolf Eichmann. Formative Years Adolf Otto Eichmann was born in Solingen,
Germany on March 19th, 1906 to book-keeper, Adolf Karl Eichmann and his wife Maria. The oldest of five children, young Adolf was
a nervous, shy child with few friends. When he was seven years old, his father moved
to Linz to take a job as a commercial manager for the city’s electrical provider, with
the rest of the family following a year later. In Linz, Adolf attended the Kaiser Franz Joseph
secondary school, the same school that Adolf Hitler had attended in the 1890’s. He remained an aloof and lonely child and
his parents worried about his lack of social skills. His dark complexion and distinctive nose and
ears led to his schoolmates teasing him with the nickname ‘der kleine Jude’ – the
little Jew. Adolf proved to be a mediocre student at best. By the time he became a teenager he had a
reputation as being difficult and moody, with his father having written him off as a no
hoper. With little promise of furthering an education,
he quit school at age fifteen and began to train as a mechanic. But at this, too, he proved a failure. After two frustrating years, he gave up on
this career and took a job as a sales agent for a mining company. This job also lasted for two years, after
which he became a district agent for an oil company. By the age of twenty-five, Eichmann was a
sullen, withdrawn, socially inept little man who could still be mistaken for a Jew. He had a stable but uninspiring job that saw
him working around Upper Austria and Salzburg. In 1932, despite never having shown any interest
in political affairs, he joined the National Socialist Party. His association with the party began at the
urging of a friend by the name of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was a party official. Becoming a Nazi For Eichmann the party gave him an opportunity
to belong to a group and to advance his station in life. More than anything he wanted to be somebody
and to prove to the world that he had value as an individual. In November, 1932 he was accepted into the
ranks of the SS, with his duties involving forming part of the protection squad for speakers
at party rallies and guarding the party headquarters at Linz. Meanwhile he continued working for the oil
company. A few weeks after Hitler became Chancellor
of Germany in January, 1933, Eichmann lost his job due to staff cutbacks. He immediately applied for active SS duty
in Germany. This was accepted and he proved to be a diligent
follower of orders, rising to the rank of Scharfuhrer in just a few months. In November, 1933 he was appointed to the
administrative staff of the Dachau concentration camp. At Dachau, Eichmann’s job was to keep a
detailed catalog of all the items that were confiscated from incoming Jewish prisoners. He did the job well but found it to be exceedingly
boring. Around this time, he began to set his mind
to studying and inculcating the basic principles of Nazism. In summing up what he had come to believe
he said . . . If they had told me that my own father was
a traitor and I had to kill him, I’d have done it! In an attempt to break out of his monotonous
routine at Dachau, in 1934 Eichmann applied to join the SD, which was the security service
of the SS. His application was successful and he was
transferred to the Nazi Party head office in Berlin. He was quickly promoted to the rank of Hauptscharfuhrer. The Jewish Specialist Eichmann’s job was now to investigate and
create reports on the activities of Jewish organizations in Germany. He threw himself into the work, learning the
basics of the Hebrew language and establishing himself as the Nazi party expert on the culture
and history of the Jews. Around this time, the perennially shy Eichmann
met and fell in love with Veronika Liebl. After the required vetting to ensure that
she had no Jewish heritage, the couple were married on March 21st, 1935. They would go on to have four sons. In 1937, Eichmann, who now held the rank of
SS Untersturmfuhrer (second Lieutenant) was sent on an important mission to the British
Mandate of Palestine. Along with his superior officer, he was there
to investigate the feasibility of German Jews being forcibly made to migrate to Palestine. But the mission never got off the ground with
the British refusing them entry into the country. In the wake of the annexation of Austria,
Eichmann moved to Vienna, with the job of organizing the local SS. His efficiency in doing so earned him another
promotion, this time to the rank of SS Obersturmfuhrer (first lieutenant). He was also selected to initiate the Central
Office for Jewish Emigration, whose express purpose was to force the expulsion of all
Jews from Austria. Expelling the Jews Eichmann threw himself into this new role
with his usual zeal. Within eight months, he had stripped the vast
majority of Jews in the country of all of their lands and possessions and forced forty-five
thousand to get out. Ominously, a further one hundred and fifty
thousand simply disappeared. His efficiency greatly impressed his superiors. With the invasion of Poland on September 1st
,1939 and the subsequent outbreak of war, Hitler’s policy towards the Jews changed. No longer would they be encouraged to leave
Germany – from now on they would be forcibly deported. Jews were to be herded together and sent to
concentration camps situated in newly acquired parts of the Reich. In October, 1939, Eichmann was posted to Berlin,
where he worked directly under Gestapo chief, Heinrich Muller in establishing the nationwide
Central Office for Jewish Emigration. His first job was to clear specified areas
of Poland of Jews. At the same time, he continued his pet project
of ridding his beloved Vienna of the Jewish ‘problem’. He selected Nisko, in the far north of Poland,
as the site for a transit camp where the expelled Jews would be gathered before sending them
into the harsh Russian wilderness to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, ethnic Germans were being moved
into the areas of Poland that the Jews had been evicted from. On December 19th, 1939, Eichmann received
yet another promotion. He was now the overall coordinator of Jewish
affairs and evacuation for the entire German Reich. All deportations to camps in Poland were now
under his ultimate control. Many thousands of Jews were also being sent
to an area in the east of Poland known as the General Government. Eichmann immediately drew up plans to send
600,000 Jews into the General Government, but these plans were pushed back due to complaints
by authorities in the east who were worried that too many Jews would ruin the economy. In the end some 63,000 people were relocated
to the area, with many others dying in transit. All over occupied Europe, Jews were crowded
into ghettos as they waited to be sent away. The conditions in the ghettoes were appalling,
and many people died before they ever set foot on a train carriage. In 1940, Eichmann released a plan to resettle
a million people each year in Madagascar. His plan had relied on the Luftwaffe conquering
the British in the Battle of Britain, which would have enabled the Germans to take control
of the skies over the Atlantic. When this failed to happen, the plans for
Operation Madagascar were shelved indefinitely. Killing the Jews In September of 1941, Eichmann was called
to a meeting with head of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, in which he was informed that the
Fuhrer had ordered that all Jews in countries occupied by Germany were to be put to death. The timeline for this was to swing into action
after the conquest of the Soviet Union. However, the entry of the United States into
the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced a rethink. The extermination of the Jews was to be given
maximum priority. In January, 1942, Heydrich called a meeting
of the major players in the Nazi organization at Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin. It was during this meeting that an official
policy of Jewish genocide was laid out. Heydrich called it the Final Solution to the
Jewish Question. Eichmann had prepared for the meeting by creating
lists of the numbers of Jews in each country who had to eliminated. Heydrich then appointed him as his right-hand
man, responsible for coordinating all of the trains that would be used to carry Jews to
Polish concentration camps. As a result of the constant supply of human
fodder that Eichmann was responsible for, the Death Camps at Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka
and Buchenwald became 24 hour killing machines. Eichmann funnelled Jews and Gypsies from Austria,
Holland, France, Holland, the Baltic States and Yugoslavia to their slaughter. Often, they were sent first to Warsaw and
other ghettoes in Poland for ‘resettlement’ further east. In a gross example of distorted perception,
Eichmann wrote the following about his work . . . Jewry was grateful for the chance I gave it
to learn community life at the ghetto. It made an excellent school for the future
in Israel – basically most Jews feel well and happy in their ghetto life. As the months passed, the demands placed on
Eichmann to speed up the killing machine increased. He was responsible for supplying victims to
a total of 164 camps spread throughout eastern Europe. In attempts to make the process more efficient
he oversaw the enlargement of the death trains. Still, he gave no thought to supplying those
who were crammed into the carriages for weeks on end with food or water and many of them
died on the way. Eichmann’ organizational ability was also
employed to improve the efficiency of the actual killing process. He designed the huge windowless rooms and
suggested that they be disguised as shower units in order to allay panic. He also pushed for the replacement of the
relatively inefficient carbon monoxide gas with the cyanide-based insecticide Zyklon-B. We can get an insight into Eichmann’s ruthless
efficiency by an incident which occurred during a roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942. Seven thousand people were rounded up, 4051
of them being children. However, the city powers objected to the deportation
and managed to secure talks with Eichmann. The Jews were holed up in a warehouse without
food or water. For six days, Eichmann stared down the French
officials, insisting that every single Jew had to be sent east to their deaths. In 1944, Eichmann was transferred to Hungary,
which had recently been overrun by the Nazis. He was tasked with fast tracking the transportation
of Hungarian Jews to the death camps, which he did with ruthless efficiency. In just a few months he had condemned more
than 400,000 of them. Getting Out By early in 1945 it was obvious to many in
the Nazi hierarchy that the game was up. With the Russians coming at them from one
side and the Allies closing in from the other, the priority for many became personal survival. Reinhard Heydrich decided that the time had
come to put an end to the mass extermination of the Jews and to set about destroying any
evidence of the crimes against humanity that he had authorized. When Eichmann head about this, however, he
was not happy. He decided, of his own volition, to continue,
and even speed up, the killings. But finally, even he saw the writing on the
wall. His biggest fear seemed to be the prospect
that he, having been commissioned as a reserve Untersturmfuhrer in the Waffen-SS which made
him eligible for combat duty, would be sent out to the front lines to fight the Russians
or Americans. In March, with the Russians pouring into Hungary,
he fled to Austria where he tried to get his old friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner to help him
evade capture by the Allies. But the intimate involvement that Eichmann
had had with the Jewish slaughter had made him a dangerous man to associate with and
Kaltenbrunner, who was trying to save his own skin, wanted nothing to do with him. Shortly thereafter, Eichmann was captured
by the US Army. Having given a false name, he was transferred
between several POW camps. He was part of a work detail in Cham, Germany
when he escaped. Managing to secure new identity papers, he
took on the identity of Otto Heninger and relocated to Luneburg Heath in Lower Saxony. He found work in the forestry sector. Other members of the Nazi hierarchy were not
as fortunate as Eichmann in their attempts to evade justice. Many of them ended up at the Nuremburg War
trails where they gave detailed evidence about the role that Eichmann had played in the systematic
planning and execution of the extermination of the Jew of Europe. As a result, he became one of the most sought
after Nazi war criminals. In 1950, Eichmann relocated to Italy. Here he received the assistance of Alois Hudal,
a Roman Catholic bishop who was a Nazi sympathizer and had already helped many to get out of
Europe. Hudal helped Eichmann obtain a humanitarian
passport from the International Committee of the Red Cross, along with a fake identification
and landing permit for Argentina. With these documents he was able to secure
an international passport from the Red Cross. He now had everything needed to sail for South
America. He departed from Genoa on June 17th, 1950
and arrived in Buenos Aires on July 14th. Hunted For the next two years, under the name of
Ricardo Klement, Eichmann worked for a government contractor in Tucuman Province. After two years he felt secure enough to bring
over his wife and sons. They moved to Buenos Aires, where Eichmann
worked in a series of menial jobs before finding employment with Mercedes Benz. Over the next few years he would employ his
natural organizational skills to rise to the position of department head. Beginning in 1956, a neo-Nazi fanatic began
interviewing Eichmann at his home with the goal of writing a fawning biography. For this project, a large and damning collection
of tapes, transcripts and notes were produced. Meanwhile a handful of determined Nazi-hunters
were hot on Eichmann’s trail. Prominent among them was former concentration
camp inmate Simon Wiesenthal. In 1953, Wiesenthal had found a postcard in
which a former Nazi victim had mentioned seeing ‘that pig Eichmann’ in Buenos Aires. He passed this information on to the Israeli
Consulate in Vienna. The American CIA were also aware that Eichmann
was in South America. However, the were unwilling to act on the
information for fear of embarrassing themselves. In the post-war years the Americans had employed
a number of Nazis to work on the Manhattan atomic bomb project. They didn’t want to go near anything that
would allow that information to leak to the public. Meanwhile Wiesenthal was working with the
Israeli Intelligence Service, MOSSAD, to build a picture of Eichmann’s life in Argentina. A break came when Eichmann’s second oldest
son got involved with the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who had relocated to Argentina. The boy began to boast that his father had
worked for Hitler and was, in fact, the brains behind the final solution of the Jewish question. The girl promptly reported this information
back to her father, who, in turn, informed the Israeli authorities. MOSSAD sent an operative to Buenos Aires to
confirm Eichmann’s location and identity. It was now up to Israeli Prime Minister David
Ben Gurion to decide whether to proceed diplomatically or to simply seize Eichmann and bring him
back to Israel to face the music. Knowing that the Argentinians had a record
of declining extradition requests involving former Nazis, Ben Gurion decided to take Eichmann
by force. An eight-man team of MOSSAD operatives was
sent to Argentina to carry out the mission. The operation was carried out on May 11th,
1960 as Eichmann was walking home from work. Two agents pretended to be working on a car
as he walked past. A third agent approached and asked him for
a cigarette. Eichmann eyed the man nervously and, in that
moment, all three agents sprang upon him. One of them, a karate black belt, delivered
a blow to his neck which rendered him unconscious. Eichmann was bundled into a car and taken
to a safe house where he was stripped naked and examined. Under his right armpit the agents found a
partially removed tattoo which confirmed that he was member of the SS. On May 21st, a heavily sedated Eichmann was
smuggled out of Argentina on a commercial flight bound for Israel. Captured When Prime Minister Ben Gurion announced that
the most wanted Nazi in the world had been captured it caused an international sensation. The Argentinians strongly protested the manner
of the abduction, claiming that it had been a violation of Argentinian sovereignty. Ben Gurion replied that Eichmann had been
captured, not by agents of the Israeli government, but by individual citizens. The trial of Adolf Eichmann began on April
11th, 1961 in Israel’s Beth Ha’am (House of the People). Fifteen charges were levelled against him,
including crimes against humanity. The charges encompassed the view that he was
the man in direct control of the entire Nazi bureaucratic structure responsible for the
deaths of millions of people before and during the war. Eichmann’s trial was broadcast live on TV
stations around the globe. After listening to the emotional testimony
of Holocaust survivors and others, Eichmann didn’t try to deny the facts. His sole defense was that he was simply carrying
out orders. He stated that he . . . never did anything, great or small, without
obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors. The trial took fourteen weeks, at the end
of which Eichmann as convicted on all counts. The sentence was death by hanging. His defence team made an unsuccessful appeal
for clemency which was turned down by new Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. The execution was carried out on June 1st,
1962 at Israel’s Ramla prison. Eichmann refused the black hood that was offered
to him on the gallows. His final words were . . . Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These are the countries with who I have been
most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.’ Eichmann’s body was cremated and his ashes
scattered in international waters in
the Mediterranean Sea.
